Violent rhetoric in poisoned US politics made attack inevitable.Nazi comparisons, which would be greeted with furious offence if they came the other way, have become commonplace among the Left.
Demonisation demands destruction. Throughout history, spiralling rhetoric has led to dehumanisation and violence. And in America, from Lincoln to Kennedy, it has also produced assassinations.
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In a video call with donors on Monday, Joe Biden said “it’s time to put Trump in the bull’s-eye”; just days ago, a new Democratic advertisement branded Trump “a lapdog for a dictator who blames America first”. Further back, Biden famously remarked that, “if we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”
By themselves, these statements may simply be examples of the cut-and-thrust of campaigning. Politics are politics. Hindsight is hindsight. Such is the frenzy of the debate, however, that this is the mildest vanguard of a trend for attacking Trump in the most graphic terms and getting away with it. For all the Left’s exhortations to “be kind”, they seem happy to make an exception when it comes to the 45th president.
Take the musicians. The rapper Snoop Dogg – who has 20.7 million followers on X/Twitter alone – has aimed a gun at a clown dressed as Trump. Moby, the DJ, has depicted a robot Trump transforming into a dollar sign merged with a swastika before malfunctioning and blowing up. Madonna, who also has millions of followers on social media, has ranted about “blowing up the White House”. The iconic grunge band Pearl Jam has produced a poster depicting Trump’s rotting corpse on the lawn of a burning White House, being eaten by an eagle.
It is hard to imagine these people reacting with sanguinity if a Democrat was abused in the same way. When Sarah Palin produced a map of target congressional districts marked with cross-hair symbols, she was blamed for inciting the subsequent shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords in Arizona. And when a rodeo clown in Missouri put on an Obama mask while spectators were asked if they wanted to see “Obama run down by a bull,” he was banned for life.
The hypocrisy is hard to ignore. Take the actors. As far back as 2016, Robert De Niro declared, “he’s a punk, he’s a dog, he’s a pig … I’d like to punch him in the face”. In 2019, Mickey Rourke vowed, “we’re gonna bump into each other… A left hook from hell.” Pirates of the Caribbean star Johnny Depp went one step further, telling a crowd at Glastonbury: “There are a lot of wonderful dark, dark places he could go… When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?”
Nazi comparisons, which would be greeted with furious offence if they came the other way, have become commonplace. The cover of last month’s The New Republic blended the faces of Trump and Hitler above the words “American fascism”, printed in Gothic script. On TikTok last week, Joy Reid, the MSNBC presenter, said: “Let me know who I got to vote for to keep Hitler out of the White House.”
Are we supposed to think this is OK? Trump may be divisive and unpleasant, but would he order a Holocaust? Again: demonisation demands destruction. Children sometimes ask each other if they would go back and kill the German dictator, were a time machine invented. But you don’t need a time machine to kill Trump.
The Republican nominee is hardly innocent of using aggressive rhetoric himself, of course. After losing the election in 2020, his rabble-rousing speeches were blamed – rightly or wrongly – for the insurrection on Capitol Hill. In 2020, ABC News claimed to have found 54 cases in which he had inspired violence and threats, including a plot to bomb a block of flats in Kansas that had many Muslim residents.
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